Startup

Blitzscaling: A Chemical Reaction

This post explores my key takeaways from CS183C. I noticed several similarities chemical reactions…

Blitzscaling: Abstractions are powerful

I am taking CS183C (Technology enabled Blitzscaling) this quarter at Stanford. Prompt for this week: Write about how the principles of blitzscaling change as you achieve real scale (e.g. Village, City). Focus on things which: a) resonated the most with you and…

How to Kill a Baby Unicorn

There are ways to fail at being a 450 person company… there are a lot of failures at this point… so when you look at the current giants they’re not just there because “oh I got the right app and I had the right product market fit and now I just hang on to it and I just do what any…

Founder’s transition to a Leader

The transition of a startup from the “tribe” to “village/city” stage creates an imminent need for the founder to grow into the role of a leader. This essay focuses on all aspects of this transition that I find intriguing and how they relate to the principles of…

Know Thy Phase

In their book “Blitzscaling”, Reid Hoffman and Chris Yea outline 5 key phases of a company’s scaleup maturity: Family, Tribe, Village, City, and Nation.

A large company may appear to be just a scaled up startup, but Chris and Reid argue that the phases are notably distinct…

Letting Demand Pull You Into Scaling: How to Know When To Go From A Family To A Tribe

They say that if you don’t know if you have product-market fit, you don’t have it. Once you know you have it, however, the question at hand becomes “when and how quickly do we scale?”

Hiring the Right People

One of the most important duties of a founder is hiring. Especially in the early days, each new employee added to the…